Encouraging consciousness raising through teaching History in FE.

 Encouraging consciousness raising through teaching History in FE.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.

When change is absolute there remains no being to improve

and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when

experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The first point to consider when teaching History to learners in FE is their level of emotional maturity and their ability to appreciate the complexity surrounding sensitive topics. This is the reason why topics pertaining to World War One or the Holocaust are not generally taught on the National Curriculum until Key Stage 4 (The T.E.A.C.H Report). The rationale governing this choice to delay teaching such topics is that essentially the full extent of the depravity humanity has exhibited, particularly over the last century, is uncomfortable to acknowledge and the teaching of such modules must be done in earnest.

George Santayana’s immortal words ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ are often cited erroneously, yet his meaning his unquestionable; learning from our mistakes is a crucial skill we attribute to self-awareness and advancement. Yet without fully appreciating the past, both individually and as part of wider society, we cannot hope to learn from our more deplorable epochs any more than we can hope to be inspired from our greatest accomplishments. Learning lessons from the past can also provide us with a unique perspective on how to react to contemporary world issues. For example, the denunciation and criticism leveled at Islam in the Western hemisphere since 9/11 is comparable to the persecution of Catholicism in England in the Seventeenth century after the Gun Powder Plot. Therefore from studying the past, learners can truly appreciate that there are no unprecedented events occurring in the world today; there is always an historical precedent to compare them to because all human activity is driven by unchanging human nature. Therefore, it can be argued that the past may hold a great many answers to the pressing questions being asked today. And in terms of sociological advancement, before prevention must come prediction – if we can identify the reasons behind our less palatable annals of history then we can at least attempt to preclude similar events from occurring again. In short, it is worth remembering the epitaph ‘Lest we forget’ from the poem of Rudyard Kipling; learning from history involves digesting the good with the bad, and teaching History involves teaching learners to take collective responsibility for its entirety so that ultimately the messages we need to remember are passed from generation to generation in memorium to the humanity that is so often overlooked in the pages of a textbook.

Teaching a module such as black Civil Rights in America often proves popular with learners and teachers alike; the enthusiasm learners have for this topic is correlative to the period being relatively recent, with key events in world importance happening within the last half century. According to one senior lecturers in History whom I have worked with and whom have taught the topic for many years, the difficulty for today’s learner lies in grasping that within our own lifetime, some people, in one of the most powerful nations in the world, a country that prided itself on being the world’s defender of liberty, did not enjoy basic civil rights. From our Twenty-first Century perspective we are unaccustomed to thinking back on a period where such bigotry and intolerance was rife in society, and not only this, was seemingly supported and endorsed by the law. Through the use of new and emerging technologies in the class room, learners are able to view primary sources from the period, most notoriously perhaps are the photographs printed concerning the murder of Emmet Till, a young boy who was kidnapped and brutally murdered while on a visit to the South for simply conversing with a white shopkeeper. His mother’s choice to display her son in an open casket took full advantage of the new media of television and photography, and the horrific photographs that featured in many news reports helped to formulate public support against such a heinous crime, and in doing so brought the Civil Rights movement much needed momentum. Similarly, today the same images are capable of having a profound effect, stirring emotion in the learner and helping to bring a human face to the events documented in the textbooks. As the Civil Rights movement is still relatively recent, the events transpiring within our lifetime, there is a general consensus gained by teachers and learners that this history is still being written today; the full effects of racial discrimination in the USA in past decades are still influencing news coverage. In 1992, the beating of Rodney King led to the Los Angeles Race Riots, and in 2008 the United States elected its first black President in Barack Obama. Therefore the topic can best be described as a type of living-history, where we are teaching about a period that is still very relevant and issues that are still very prevalent in the world today. According to one learner I interviewed, studying the topic expelled her ‘complacency’ relating to her own civil liberties and allowed her to realize that a lot of the freedoms we take for granted had to be fought for and won during a bitter campaign amid oppression and social degradation, so it is fitting that Civil Rights is still taught almost in homage to the men and women, from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to the unnamed, unsung members of the Civil Rights movement in America, and through studying a panoramic assessment of social challenges to racism, legal challenges and political challenges, learners can begin to evaluate how successful society has been in eradicating racial discrimination in recent years.

Another module which strikes accord with learners if the Suffragettes. Having had the opportunity to teach the topic to learners in Greater Manchester, it was interesting to see the impact that this had upon them, particularly the female members of the group. Like Civil Rights, there was a reaction of shock and repulsion from the learners who had difficulty accepting that the prejudicial attitudes of men towards women were so disproportionately executed in law and that less than one hundred years ago, women in our own country did not have the right to participatory democracy through the vote. Learning about the strife of women in this period, and the feats accomplished by the likes of Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, enthuses female learners when they realize the lengths that women had to go to in order to achieve the same legal stature as men. And what truly reinforces the sense of injustice among learners is the realization that even today, women are still barred from some professions in the armed forces etc. and receive less pay for doing the same work as men in others. This helps learners to realize just how relevant these topics are to today’s society and hopefully inspires them to continue to support different campaigns for an end to social injustice.

Therefore with regard to subject matter it is clear that teaching modules in History relating to concepts of injustice, intolerance and prejudice can go a long way to help remedy these problems by informing learners of the historical struggles large groups of people have undertaken for equality, whether it be tackling prejudice based on race, gender, sexuality or religion, and how their struggles should inspire us to continue their campaign for tolerance and liberty. Another element of teaching History that is capable of motivating and inspiring learners is the teaching of local history. With relation to the Suffragettes, teaching such a module in Manchester, the birthplace of pioneers such as the Dickinson family, allow learners to retrace the footsteps of these inspiring individuals and visit the places they did. It is a very human fascination we have with regard to tactile stimulation and being able to touch and feel the same things and walk among the same places that our historical heroes have. And although, as Marx maintained, ‘the history of all hitherto society is the history of the class struggle’, teaching local geographical history gives the learner a sense of more direct involvement with the topic, and the possibility that perhaps their ancestors were part of these campaigns for social justice and improvement.

When recognizing the enormous lengths local people went to in order to campaign for greater equality it hopefully inspires and motivates learners to participate more in their local community as history can often be our common heritage. It is our ties to the past that binds us together in the present and they should continue to do so with the teaching of local history. Therefore, History as an academic subject has the potential to aid with community cohesion by reminding our learners of our shared inheritance from local groups in the industrial North, such as the Suffragettes and the Chartists. And with particular  regard to offender learning, teaching social history to this group of people has the potential for enormous benefit; there is a therapeutic aspect to learning about the struggles of others that can aid with rehabilitation as history can increase awareness and enlightenment and put our own misdemeanors into perspective.

To conclude, teaching History provides us with an opportunity to not only inform our learners of the factual information that has occurred in times gone by, as this would be irrelevant without focusing on the issues surrounding them. Appealing to attitudes of social justice, liberty, the denunciation of prejudice and the struggle for social advancement underpin all basic human endeavor and give these areas of history a relevance to all. Teaching about topics such as World War One and the Holocaust allow us to pass down important messages to each subsequent generation in the hope that we can prevent such horrors from occurring again and out of veneration to the ordinary men and women who have made it their life’s work, such as the Suffragettes and members of the Civil Rights movement, to improve the standard of living for all. When teaching and studying some modules of social history a key message emerges: all of us are born into a world that is divided in one way or another. Some of us have the strength to seek to heal those divisions – figures of adulation such as Martin Luther King and Emmeline Pankhurst. And while it is all too often a bittersweet and poignant reality that these figures do not live to see their visions accomplished, hopefully their stories inspire us enough to make sure that we continue their goal of a world united and free from intolerance. The British statesman Edmund Burke once said that ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’. Hopefully, through the teaching of social history in the classroom, we can pass on the message that wherever we witness intolerance and prejudice it is the responsibility of us all to challenge this and to seek to eradicate it.  

Edmund Burke, as cited in ‘Edmund Burke’ by Connor Cruise O’Brien (2002). Vintage. London.

Rudyard Kipling (1897) in Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900

Karl Marx (1844), ‘The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto’, England.

George Santayana (1905), ‘The Life of Reason, Volume 1’.

The Historical Association. (2007) ‘A Report from The Historical Association on

the Challenges and Opportunities for Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19. London.